AMC’s zombie hit The Walking Dead has garnered a huge global audience. As the finale of the series’ fifth season screens, we should pay attention not to the zombies – but to the survivors.
An emphasis on the ruins of the recent past places Zvyagintsev’s film within a very interesting genre of post-Soviet films.
Palace Films
Andrey Zvyagintsev’s film Leviathan explores the ‘symphonia’ of church and state in Vladimir Putin’s Russia. In doing so it taps into a tradition in Soviet and post-Soviet cinema.
‘It is difficult to convey the exhilaration that can be received from recognising elements of your own intimate life magnified on a cinema screen.’ Anatomy of a Love Seen screens at the Melbourne Queer Film Festival.
MQFF
The curators of queer film festivals undertake a challenging task, assembling as best as possible a cinematic selection that reflects what is a very diverse community. Too often, lesbians are left out.
Empire, currently screening on Channel Ten, is throwing stereotypes to the wind and presenting strong drama that is black, queer, and diverse.
Channel Ten
Empire, a TV drama about a black hip-hop star turned music mogul, is breaking new ground by foregrounding ‘risky’ issues around race, sexuality and class.
For 30 years the families of Ramsay Street have been working out their problems before a devoted international audience.
AAP Image/Ten
Why don’t we Australians love our Neighbours? Perhaps the long-running soap is a local victim of tall poppy syndrome – but the sunny vision of Australian suburban life remains wildly popular internationally.
Much more television is being produced today than ever before, across all genres.
Ricardo Mendonça Ferreira
Speaking with: David Tiley on funding Australian films
CC BY-ND23.2 MB(download)
Vincent O’Donnell speaks with David Tiley, editor of ScreenHub magazine, about financing film production in Australia and looking beyond box office numbers to measure a film's success.
New technologies are allowing us to understand far more about what we see when we watch a screen.
Arthur Cruz
What are we really looking at when we watch a screen? There’s more to it than Gogglebox. Advances in eye-tracking technology are transforming how we understand film and TV spectatorship.
The politics of space governs the relationships between characters in Robin Campanillo’s Eastern Boys.
Palace Films
The camera, situated in the middle of the foyer of a public building, looks through large windows into the street and city beyond. The protagonist couple of Eastern Boys – affluent Frenchman Daniel (Olivier…
We can’t talk about “consensual” BDSM without considering the levels of violence against women.
Universal Pictures
This Valentine’s Day, why not ditch the roses and celebrate by watching some sexual violence? That’s a more honest marketing pitch for the Fifty Shades of Grey film. It’s astonishing that, in 2015, sexual…
Peter Sarsgaard stars as the psychologist Stanley Milgram in the new film The Experimenter.
BB Film Productions
Why have the landmark psychology experiments of the post-war era proved so enduring? Designed as dramas about human behaviour, experimenters drew on theatrical techniques and tailored their results for…
Recognition is a super-human process that requires sacrifice …. and a bit of flying.
Atsushi Nishijima/Twentieth Century Fox
What do Shakespeare’s Hamlet, The Simpsons, and Alejandro G. Iñárritu’s film Birdman have in common? All three utilise the concept of meta-theatre. The concept of meta-theatre, or meta-text, in its crudest…
Frankie Alvarez as Agustin and O.T. Fagbenle as Frank in Looking.
Foxtel
Show a gay man on TV, and you immediately open yourself up to a degree of scrutiny that other artists usually have the privilege of avoiding. Representations of marginalised subjects on screen or in literature…
Cinema has always been about spectacle – it’s not yet walking dead.
AAP/Marcus Walters, Gerrit Fokkema
At the opening night of the Victorian College of the Arts graduate film screening season this month, keynote speaker Clayton Jacobson (writer/director of Kenny, 2006) mentioned to the audience his belief…
The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies is released around the world this month. Never mind the top tens, this film will skew the box office stats for 2014 and 2015. Image: John Bell as Bain and Luke Evans as Bard. Photo: Mark Pokorny.
Warner Bros
Tis the season to make Top 10 lists. Why? Because we are hurtling with unavoidable haste toward the end of another calendar year. It’s almost impossible to get through the day without some kind of Top…
Do Yourself a Favour recently celebrated the 40th anniversary of the music show Countdown.
ABC
Are there lessons to be learnt from the success of the seminal Australian music program Countdown, and the ways in which it bolstered the Australian music industry during the 70s and 80s? Do Yourself a…
Critics write the obituaries for Australian films the weekend they’re released. Is there a better way to understand the industry?
AAP Image/Cameron Oliver
By all reports the Australian cinema is dead. Left for dust by the noisy distractions of big budget movie franchises and the smaller diversions of teeny shiny devices. All you can see in any direction…
Timothy Spall plays the British painter Joseph Turner in Mike Leigh’s latest film, Mr Turner.
Transmission Films
The work of art is that mysterious process that transforms pigment and canvas into an object of great beauty. Depicting that moment of creative inspiration has been a challenge for filmmakers since the…
Got a problem with your script? This man, script consultant Robert McKee, can save it.
AAP Image/dmcpr media
If you’ve seen Brian Cox playing Robert McKee in the 2002 film Adaptation, you probably know what a script consultant does. Following in the footsteps of other internationally-renowned script consultants…